Google: Hard Disk Drive Failure

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Another interesting little thing that I found, published this month, the paper outlines several conditions that are often perceived to be the cause of hard disk failure and, using the data that they have gathered from the hard disk in their server farms, have compiled some interesting statistics. It is, though, a technical paper – so not suited to everyone’s tastes, but it is quite a quick read.

Unfortunately, they don’t release the data about which manufacturers and models have the highest rates of failure, although it does refer in several instances to one hard disk manufacturer – for example: “When examining our population, we find that seek errors are widespread within drives of one manufacturer only…”[p. 9] It would be nice to know which this is, so they can be avoided; still, perhaps that is the very reason for why they did not publish the name.